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I'm curious if anyone has tried out the OpenOSX solution. It's basically a friendly installer wrapped around a bunch of scripts wrapped around a lot of open-source software (Qemu is the emulation layer, apparently). They say it's a Universal Binary, and it'll book XP in less than a minute on the new iMac.

Eventually I'm going to track down my old XP installation CD and give this a shot... has anyone else had any luck?

--Mid

qemu has been ported to the Mactels, as is WinTel from openosx.com.

Of course, there's always Darwine as well.

OpenOSX is a commercial offering that claims to do what you are saying. They say that they are able to run Windwos and Linux images on Intel-based iMacs right now.

(Disclaimer: I've never used that product, make no claims as to its usefullness, and only know about it because of a recent slashdot post.)

You can already boot XP on your Intel Mac.

OpenOSX has released WinTel 2.0 as a Universal Binary, running Windows and other x86 operating systems at "near native" speeds, as they should. http://openosx.com/wintel/

OpenOSX has release Wintel 2.0 as a Universal Binary, along with various x86 OS images. Windows runs at "near native" speed, which I guess it should. http://openosx.com/wintel/

But if you're looking for the kitchen sink, some people have apparently ported various Gnome office apps into an integrated bundle. The company behind the offering appears to have turned the traditional definition of free on its head. The software is free in the GNU sense, but you're charged $30 for a download of the (pre-built) binaries. I still need to check the site if there are patches available for free download, or if the company simply used some exotic compiler that would make it extremely difficult (or expensive) to (legally) roll out your own executables.

Gnumeric already works on OS X, and if Apple had any sense, they'd bundle a rebranded version of that.

Contextual pop-ups are fine, but they should never, -never-, -=never=- be the only way to get to a feature...

Windows only sw: Assuming a Mac equivalent won't do or can't be found, you're probably gonna have to go VPC here. Continue waiting for MS to deliver a G5 compatible version. :-/ Or try Bochs if it can't wait. Likely to be slower than VPC, but better than nothing.

If old sw: I presume this is to access old files in proprietary formats? If that is the case, get GraphicConverter, Stuffit, MacLinkPlus, and possibly SoundApp on Classic. Those four apps should cover practically every old file format in existence. Some video files will require the use of classic: Indeo 3.2, 4.4, 5.0 and i263 codecs are only available on classic. Most everything else will work fine with QuickTime Player, Video Lan Client (VLC player)/mPlayer, and Real Player on OS X. WMV3 is about the only spot missing. Use Microsoft's WMP for that if you must.

If games: buy mac games. VPC is a poor gaming platform anyway.

I am not surprised to hear Archei has not provided any support for MacGimp. I think they are rather slimy company who takes advantage of open source software like OpenOSX. I happened to know the brother of the guy who runs Archei, and let me tell you, and based upon his business model, I can believe Archei's business model being as bad as his brother's.

You've taken a valid problem that only affects a very small number of users, and blown it way out of proportion.

>Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.
It's a fairly safe argument that current Apple laptops are the among the most usable laptops ever made. Many, many articles have been written and awards given praising their excellent usability and design. They were specifically designed to run Apple's own Unix which ships preinstalled.

As far as I know there are no non-Unix operating systems that will run on directly on the hardware of current Apple laptops. (I'm lumping Linux in with Unix here.) I'm not 100% sure that somebody hasn't gotten AmigaOS or Be or something like that to run on current PB or iBook hardware, but even if they have, I doubt that there is even a single user in the whole wide world who uses anything like that as the primary OS on a current Apple laptop. It would be shocking indeed to find that they sold 157,000 PowerBooks and 217,000 iBooks last quarter if your claim that they were "effectively unusable" for all of their users were true.

>Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users! This is not merely speculation on my part.
No, it's a misunderstanding on your part, apparently reinforced by a single Apple employee who is either spreading incorrect information or whom you misunderstood. For Apple to ignore all Unix users would be to ignore all of their Mac OS X users.

>Apple has been ignoring Unix users for more than 13 years.
Well, they must have ignored their A/UX users (I believe A/UX was discontinued about 9 years ago, which was when the AWS 95 was discontinued), and their Apple Network Server users as well (the ANS line was discontinued just over 7 years ago, and ran AIX), if your figure of 13 years is to be believed. I do agree that Apple is probably not paying a lot of attention to A/UX and Apple Network Server users lately.

In fact, all that your "more than 13 years" link shows is that there was somebody 13 years ago who wanted to remap his Mac's keyboard and didn't know how.

You make a huge leap in assuming that the majority of Unix users want their Ctrl and Caps Lock keys in the same place that you do, and that Apple's failure to reimplement their keyboard hardware interface proves that they are ignoring Unix users as a whole. The fact is, uControl fills this need for Mac OS X users.

If you have a genuine need to run OpenBSD or NetBSD on an Apple laptop, you could run it inside Bochs/WinTel or VirtualPC. I don't know of any good non-emulator virtualization layers for Mac OS X that are comparable to VMWare on x86; that is, ones that can run PPC on PPC without the overhead of emulation. (Panther has a Linux API compatibility layer, so it may be possible to compile User Mode Linux (which has been ported to PPC) so that you could run LinuxPPC on top of Mac OS X without emulation, but that doesn't get you OpenBSD or NetBSD.) However, since Mac OS X is Unix already, there isn't much need to run another PPC *nix on top of it, so I can understand why there don't seem to be any projects that provide this functionality. Likewise, I can see how Apple could be aware of the requirement that some users prefer that keyboard layout tweak, and could be satisfied with uControl + Mac OS X as the solution for that requirement. I'd like to hear what an Apple systems engineer or Apple Store "Genius" would have to say in response to your demand ("I want to run OpenBSD/NetBSD on one of your laptops instead of Mac OS X, so you have to re-engineer your keyboards to not use ADB anymore"). It would be pretty funny watching them try to be diplomatic in the face of such a request.

>How Unix friendly is a 1-button mouse with X prog

But you can do all of that! Off the whole "OSX is BSD, but prettier" angle, all you have to do is load up ">console" mode at login, and fire up an XWindow manager. Poof, looks and works just like linux.

Given, OSX's Aqua has cleaner better solutions than that, IE, GIMP runs fine under the X11, or you can pay $$25 and get an Aqua'd version from Open OS X. As for virtual vesktops, there's a host of 3rd party apps for it, but make sure you give Expose a try first. Greatest thing since slice bread.

Read their "Press Release" here.

Below is a snippet from the "press release."

Jeshua then stated that "It is absolutely shameful a business would state on their website to avoid CD's they themselves stole from a legitimate business that created the product they are selling. What's even more sad is that MacGimp has high respect in the community."

Robert Atlee was one of the founders of this company, and provided a substantial part of the initial equipment and funding. He is listed on the contact page rather unprofessionally as "terminated." I spoke with him on the phone about three months after he footed the bill for the double-wide booth that Jeshua Lacock ran at MacWorld. He was rather upset at the time that Jeshua had basically skipped town with a bunch of his computer equipment and had locked him out of the web server etc. I'm sure that every story has two sides, but at this point in time, not only Mr. Atlee, and Christoph Pfisterer, but also myself have received poor treatment at the hands of Jeshua Lacock, the sole proprietor of OpenOSX.

Slashdot doesn't probably have the budget that professional news sources do, so we can't expect all of the stories to be double or triple cross-checked. My guess is that if you start asking around (tax records? employees? better business bureau?), you'll find that few others have genuinely benefitted at the hands of this opportunist. The MacGIMP project helped to fund GIMPCon 2003. Has OpenOSX EVER given back to the community that built the software it sells?

One of the first rules of polite public behaviour is to give credit where it is due. Jeshua has attacked my reputation and left a rude web page up with my name on it (after numerous requests to have it taken down) and upset a very good open source developer (Chris Pfisterer) and has managed to con his business partner out of the equipment it took to get everything he had started. Make up your own mind, but I refuse to do business with someone who has managed to offend this many reasonable people without having made any visible efforts whatsoever to set things right.

Ok, so this new alternative may not be as fast as Virtual PC. But you know what really impresses me? Look at how quickly an alternative to this Virtual PC problem was produced.

Uh, not really. OpenOSX is selling WinTel since December 2001. So it's more like a "look how quickly someone got the idea to use the VPC/G5 incompatibility to get some free PR". For a public relations stunt, it was not really quick.

"The software on this CD is distributed under the GNU General Public License and the OpenOSX WinTel License."

The only link on the page I can see to anything about a license is a link to the GPL

I have no idea what the actual software is released under. They currently do not seem to have the OpenOSX WinTel license available yet to look at.

This looks interesting, though. Almost enough for me to install it.

for those who are interested in bochs, Wintel is a bochs frontend that makes the configuration/use GUI (read: easy!) :)

for those who don't want to tink Wintel is a gui frontend to bochs, to make setup/use easier. Enjoy!

And, if you want a nice, pretty, tinker-free version of Bochs, check out Wintel, from OpenOSX.

To go along with that, there's a decent Aqua GUI for Bochs--Wintel by OpenOSX.

There is GRASS for OSX.

spent the weekend trying to compile PHP 4.1.2

Marc Liyanage has what you want, or you could try OpenOSX.

I think one problem with the open source philosophy is that is opens the door for companies like openosx. The people at openosx simply repackage unix apps to run on osx. however, they seem to make no mention of who wrote the software. for example if you look at this page they make no mention that they didnt write any of the software. Then they decide to charge $30 for their repackaging, and give nothing back to the community.

you can make the argument that the various linux distros do the same, but any of the good ones always give back to the community.

I feel that this practice will become even more of a problem in the future when a lot of the major open source apps come to maturity.